There’s a middle ground between iterators and complete list of dictionaries. It’s more work, but would give you complete control over how much data you return and how many server calls you make.
You’d write a client-side iterator to give to the repeating panel. That iterator would call your server function to fetch the right amount of data. That server function would return a list of dictionaries, and would resolve any linking fields into dictionary elements.
Owen has an excellent example of doing this in the ORM library: Anvil ORM Library
The amount of work this would be might not be worth it for what you’re doing, but it’s another option.